Every Wednesday I send out a Perl quiz, usually a request to write
a program or function to perform a certain task. The 'regular' quiz
can be solved using only techniques and functions found in
Learning Perl (3rd edition) by Schwartz and Phoenix. The
'expert' quiz may be difficult. The two kinds of quizzes appear on
alternate weeks.

Mailing Lists

There are three mailing lists related to the Quiz of the Week.

The main mailing list is perl-qotw. It has very low
traffic. Each week, it gets only a few messages: a quiz on
Wednesday, a post with sample solutions on the following Monday,
and possibly an administrative note. (In the past 7 days,
perl-qotw has received exactly 3 messages.)

perl-qotw does not carry any discussion, solutions
posted by list readers, questions, comments, or chat. All those
things are directed to the second list, perl-qotw-discuss.

perl-qotw-discuss has high traffic----6
messages in the last 7 days, and sometimes as many as 100 or 200.
If that is more traffic than you would like to
receive, you may want to subscribe to
perl-qotw-discuss-digest instead. You will receive the
perl-qotw-discuss messages grouped into batches of 30,
organized into threads, and sent as a single file.

Other Mailing List Manager Commands

How to Contribute

Quizzes and sample solutions are supplied by volunteers. We can
only have quizzes if people volunteer to do this. To volunteer to
supply a quiz and a sample solution, see
these instructions and send a note to
perl-qotw-submit. If you need quiz ideas, have a look at my quiz ideas files.

If you would be willing to translate this web page into some other
language, see my notes for
translators.

Moderation

Nobody but me gets to post to perl-qotw. Posts to
perl-qotw have Reply-to: perl-qotw-discuss. If
anyone posts to perl-qotw by mistake, their message comes to
my mailbox and I send it back.

Posting to perl-qotw-discuss is restricted to subscribers
of that list. Posts that appear to be from nonsubscribers come to my
mailbox. Then I figure out if that person really is a subscriber; if
so, I send it along, and if not, I send it back. Sometimes I also
send back messages that violate the rules
below.

Nobody at all is allowed to post to perl-qotw-digest.
Digests are generated and sent automatically by a program.

List members are strongly requested to wait 60 hours after the quiz
is posted before sending any hints, proposed solutions, or other
spoilers to perl-qotw-discuss.

After 60 hours, it is all right to send messages with hints or to
show sample solutions. Any such messages should have
[SPOILER] in the subject field.

Abusive language will not be tolerated.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where should I send my solution?

You don't have to send it anywhere. The point of doing the
quiz is to have done it; it doesn't really matter if anyone
else sees it. You might want to send it to
perl-qotw-discuss if you think it's particularly good,
if you want comments on it, or if it seems to show a different
approach from the solutions that have been posted there
already. If you do this, please be sure to wait at least sixty
hours after the quiz was originally posted.

I didn't want participants to focus on who could produce an
answer most quickly. So there's a sixty-hour moratorium on posting
solutions to give everyone a chance to think about their answers
carefully. More details are here.